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 (TXT) Status: Apprehensive.
 (DIR) Dear Diary, ...
       
 (TXT) Latest Entry
       
       Sun Mar 27 12:55:48 AM EDT 2022
       
       In order to develop a deep understanding for their system,
       I'm using it in a nonstandard way -- not outside the scope
       of what it's designed to do, but outside how it's marketed.
       Applying the tool to a real-world problem where I have some
       personal interest? What could be a better driver?
       
       Let's skip forward a bit: At some age, and on a date only
       you will know, you may begin to consider that there are far
       fewer days ahead of you than there are behind you. After
       that date, you may find yourself more irrationally pissed
       than you used to be at losing a day to bullshit. Today, a
       prominent, high-dollar, proprietary software system filled
       the bulk of its pretty UI to tell me that I'd encountered an
       error that I had to resolve before proceeding. The error?
       "Index out of range."
       
       What index? What range? Who knows -- it didn't say. There
       was no additional information. There was no stack trace.
       There was no error code to search for or a link to follow.
       Just "Index out of range." What was I doing? Well, funny
       that: I was trying to export the work I had done on their
       system and to import it into another system... Like
       Microsoft Office into Open Office or the like? No. I was
       trying to move my work from their system into an updated
       version of that very same system. Using their own tools.
       Following their own instructions.
       
       For the deeper understanding, I dug a little deeper...
       Alright, maybe also to cover my bases before the support
       folks come back and tell me it's my own fault. After trying
       to migrate the work to the target system, I tried migrating
       it to another system -- different platform. I upgraded the
       current system to the same system version as the target, and
       then tried migrating to the different targets. In every
       case, the same error. I looked for some known and some
       hidden places where some error hints might be -- no luck. I
       opened up the data package it had constructed -- nothing
       obvious. In the end? I filled the support ticket.
       
       But really in the end I lost one of those remaining days,
       accomplishing nothing else but fucking around with this
       proprietary nonsense.  My data is in there, as is the
       workflow I developed to process it all. I can't even move it
       to a more capable platform running their latest and
       greatest. It's stuck until I hear back on the support
       ticket.
       
       So here's the deal: Sitting off on the side are a pair of
       Raspberry Pis collecting and preprocessing some live data
       streams for me. They're feeding this beast, sure, but the
       original system -- the one this work was based on? It's
       still just chugging along. It's bespoke to the work at hand,
       written in nodejs, dumping to mongodb -- event loops that
       take and process the data, kicking off other flows when
       different conditions are met. Every time I was dealing with
       a new hiccup on the fancy system, my old stuff never missed
       a beat... Crazy, right?
       
       Fortunately, I'll never waste a day trying to get my work
       out of their system for my own use...
       
       I have a lot to say about some of these proprietary things,
       but I'm already well over my word count for these posts.
       
       Next time.
       
       
 (TXT) about moj / contact
 (HTM) moj.sdf.org
       
       ____________________________________________________________________________
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